With the amount of plugins published in the symfony site, many great plugins get lost in the maze. With this series of posts, we would like to bring some attention to plugins we use every day or that we think are essential for any symfony developer.

sfSyncContentPlugin

Deploying symfony applications is always a key part of developing and maintaining websites that run on symfony. It is always a recommended practice to do development on a local environment or dedicated development server. It is also recommended to have a QA/staging server that is as close as possible to your production server. Using this well proven method you can spot problems and bugs before everybody else sees or experiences them, you know, those bugs that “only” happen in production, don’t tell me that it never happened to you, I won’t believe you.

Anyway, making changes in a live site is not only not recommended, it should never be done!

When developing and testing symfony applications, a lot of times you need to have a copy of the live data. Or you may have a staging server where you make changes before pushing them to a live site in a production server. symfony already provides a way to deploy code changes to a remote server, but what about uploaded and data files? And database content?

Since we discovered and started using it, we can’t live without the sfSyncContentPlugin plugin by Tom Boutell and Alex Gilbert, also developers of Apostrophe CMS. This plugin helps with all the tasks and needs described above. Using it is quite simple. All you need to do is define your servers in config/properties.ini like this:

Make sure to use SSH keys to authenticate to your remote servers, so you don’t get asked again and again for passwords. Then just run the following symfony tasks:

# Migrate files and DB from development to qa
./symfony project:sync-content frontend dev to qa@qa
# Migrate files and DB to production (always make a backup of production before doing this!)
./symfony project:sync-content frontend dev to prod@prod
# Migrate files and DB from QA into development
./symfony project:sync-content frontend dev from prod@prod

Files and DB content are copied accordingly, almost magically. It saves so much time, but please make sure you understand and check the order that you apply in the symfony task. With the power this plugin provides, is very easy, by mistake, to overwrite production data, so again, always make a backup!